A Jewish family reunion in Spain, centuries later

Originally published April 14, 2014 at 7:03 pm

Updated April 16, 2014 at 2:31 pm

Roman aqueducts, a tourist draw, in Segovia, Spain, A writer, inspired in part by the custom of Spanish Holy Week processions, embarks on a quest to uncover the secret Jewish legacy of her Segovia ancestors, who converted to Christianity centuries ago to survive and were investigated by the Spanish Inquisition for maintaining a Jewish double life.

The tower of Diego Arias Davila, a royal treasurer in 15th century Segovia, Spain, and the author’s forebear.

A shop near the cathedral sells some souvenirs that acknowledge the city’s Jewish heritage in Segovia, Spain, A writer, inspired in part by the custom of Spanish Holy Week processions, embarks on a quest to uncover the secret Jewish legacy of her ancestors, who converted to Christianity centuries ago to survive and were investigated by the Spanish Inquisition for maintaining a Jewish double life.

At twilight, I roamed a honey-colored labyrinth of brick houses in Segovia’s medieval Jewish quarter, walking a cobblestone path in the footsteps of my distant ancestor from 16 generations ago.

In the shadows, I reminded myself that every element in his story is true: a Vatican power struggle; an Inquisition trial that confused our family’s religious identity for generations; and a neighborhood infested with spies, from the queen’s minions to the leather maker and butcher.

I was hunting for documents, landmarks and even medieval recipes that could bring to life the family history of Diego Arias Dávila, a wealthy 15th-century royal treasurer to King Enrique IV who was loved and loathed for the taxes he extracted. Call it ancestral tourism, a quest for roots, branches and a family reunion across centuries.

My quest was inspired, in part, by the ancient Spanish custom of Catholic Holy Week religious processions: brotherhoods of penitents in robes and peaked hoods that for centuries marched through the narrow lanes in different regions in cities like Seville, Málaga and Segovia. The first time I saw them was in the south of Spain, passing an old Jewish quarter of whitewashed houses where the images plunged me into a medieval era when inquisitors in anonymous hoods confronted suspected heretics, including my own ancestors.

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Perhaps in some ways I know the Arias Dávila family better than my own generation. When I learned their fate, I felt my own identity shatter and shift, changing who I am.

Their dramas are preserved in Inquisition folder 1,413, No. 7, in handwritten script and housed in the Madrid national archives. Almost 200 pages are devoted to their daily habits, gleaned from neighbors turned spies — wedding rituals, burial clothes, prayers and frequently the adafina lamb stew of chick peas and cinnamon they savored, slow cooked on hot embers overnight and served on the Sabbath.

For these rituals, Diego Arias Dávila — and other Jewish ancestors who were Christian converts — were investigated by the Spanish Inquisition in 1486 for heresy. Their religious crime: maintaining a double Jewish life in secret.

On this journey to Segovia, perhaps I could find their missing tomb — their remains whisked away to evade the reach of inquisitors looking for telltale signs of Jewish burial rituals. Or maybe I could reclaim the shards of the identity of my family, which converted to Christianity centuries ago to survive but guarded a Jewish legacy in secret for generations from Spain to Costa Rica to California.

Family history and historical charm

Not many people come to explore the roots of a family tree in this rocky crag of about 55,000 people, nestled between two river valleys 55 miles north of Madrid. But there are plenty of tourists who arrive in Segovia by bus and train. Most vanish before sunset.

Then the rhythm of the city shifts to a meditative, unhurried one. For me, it’s a contemplative time to savor Segovia’s historical charm by its Gothic 16th-century cathedral and a leafy plaza of outdoor cafes where Queen Isabella was crowned — power used in 1492 to expel thousands of Jews.

For my quest, I cobbled together an approach that combined an emotional immersion in Andalusia with a methodical genealogical search to track family lines that led north to Segovia.

For one summer, my husband, Omer, and daughter, Claire, and I moved to the south of Spain, to Arcos de la Frontera. We settled in an ex-bordello, clinging on the side of a limestone cliff and a short walk from the remains of a Jewish quarter and a synagogue transformed into an orphanage during the Inquisition.

I moved there to learn the history and geography of the country and to understand why ancestors left or stayed and submerged their identity. I traveled to Arcos frequently, fascinated that food, art, music and culture could help me travel back in time.

In my work as a journalist, people had long inquired about my byline, Carvajal, a Sephardic Jewish name that in some spelling variations means lost place, rejected. But I knew nothing about the past. My father, Arnoldo Carvajal, had grown up in Costa Rica and emigrated to San Francisco with his mother and sister while a teenager. He married and, with my mother, raised six children. We were Catholic, attended weekly Sunday Mass, ate fish on Fridays and wore it all: Catholic school uniforms of green plaid skirts and medieval-style scapulars tucked around our necks.

After I started my search, I found many clues to our submerged Jewish identity from relatives, but I hit brick walls on the Carvajal line. A 19th-century Costa Rican ancestor had not registered a husband, giving her Carvajal name to a newborn, registered as a “natural son,” the polite Spanish term for illegitimate.

I had made a critical error by not looking at other family lines, ignoring an ancestral habit of intermarriage among Costa Rican cousins. I realized later it was a sign that they were marrying one another to protect secrets and preserve rituals like the menorah that my cousin said he found in my great-aunt’s bedroom after she died in 1998.

My grandmother’s line led to Spaniards who abandoned prosperous lives in Andalusia in the 16th century. One was a judge who died of a heart attack on the way to the Spanish colony of Costa Rica, and another, his young son, who drowned on the same journey in the Río Negro in Honduras. Each new generation fit together in a crossword puzzle of wives and husbands — a search for birth and death certificates that emerged in fits and starts, aided by sites like familysearch.org or ancestry.com.

Inquisition’s long reach

Segovia startled me when it surfaced in my puzzle. I knew of no family tie to the city. But my grandmother’s line leapt a new generation in the 16th century, to Isabel Arias Dávila, the wife of the first governor of Costa Rica, who emigrated from Segovia during the Inquisition.

With that name, I rapidly learned about the Inquisition trial that tangled the family’s identity for generations and forced others to lead new lives as conquistadors in Spanish colonies. The patriarch was Diego Arias Dávila, whose family converted when he was a boy and whose son Juan was the bishop of Segovia for 30 years.

The bishop’s internal political struggle with inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada turned into an epic legal clash that reached all the way to the Vatican. The Grand Inquisitor battled the bishop by probing his family for evidence of their double life. His parents and grandmother were investigated posthumously, among them Diego Arias Dávila.

Typically most cities in Spain have a cronista, a historian with a passion for the place and its quirks. In Segovia, the tourist office led me to a high school teacher named María Eugenia Contreras, who is researching the Arias Dávila family for a doctorate.

It was María Eugenia who guided me through Segovia’s tranquil neighborhoods, passing a park with nesting storks where the Mercedes convent once stood. It was the site of the last official tomb of Diego Arias Dávila, and his wife, Elvira, also a Christian convert. But even Maria Eugenia did not know what happened to their remains. They had been moved too many times. She gave me a huge gift, though, when she told me about a Salamanca professor who had painstakingly transcribed the handwritten Inquisition testimonies of 200 witnesses against the family.

I found the title — in pristine condition — through an online used-book store in Spain. It was a window into their lives — the lettuce and unleavened bread they ate at Passover, their donations of oil to the local synagogues and the telling anecdote that as he lay on his deathbed at 86, Diego Arias Dávila thundered at the Franciscan friars who had come to administer last rites to go to the devil.

He lived in an enormous palace on the southern side of the city that is dominated by its fortress tower and plastered in Segovia’s unique limestone patterns. Today, a neighboring street is named for the family. A sign also marks the landmark tower, but with no reference to the Inquisition.

Fittingly, the Arias Dávila palace has been transformed into government tax offices — a perfect legacy for a royal treasurer.

In theory, I should have felt something, but I didn’t. Instead, I felt the pangs of yearning for home — añoranza in Spanish — when I sat in a windswept little plaza at sunset near the city’s stone walls. It was loud with birdsong.

The square lies near Calle Martínez Campos, where a vanished synagogue stood that was funded by Diego’s wife, Elvira, and her presence, after reading the Inquisition transcripts, was inescapable. I wondered, as I sat in the square, if Segovia had absorbed some of her burdens and if places, like people, can be scarred by history.

Elvira converted as a young girl with her family in the 15th century in the midst of spreading anti-Semitism.

Yet it was clear from the Inquisition testimony that she yearned to maintain family bonds: taking pleasure in Jewish weddings and holidays, leaving explicit instructions before her death about who should be at her bedside. Those family ties remained so strong that she managed to share something precious with us 16 generations later. Perhaps some things are meant to be.